Kok Chuan Tan

Unified view of quantum correlations and quantum coherence

In this paper, we argue that quantum coherence in a bipartite system can be contained either locally or in the correlations between the subsystems. The portion of quantum coherence contained within correlations can be viewed as a kind quantum correlation which we call correlated coherence. We demonstrate that the framework provided by correlated coherence allows us retrieve the same concepts of quantum correlations as defined by the asymmetric and symmetrized versions of quantum discord as well as quantum entanglement, thus providing a unified view of these correlations. We also prove that correlated coherence can be formulated as an entanglement monotone, thus demonstrating that entanglement may be viewed as a specialized form of coherence.

Quantifying the Coherence between Coherent States

In this Letter, we detail an orthogonalization procedure that allows for the quantification of the amount of coherence present in an arbitrary superposition of coherent states. The present construction is based on the quantum coherence resource theory introduced by Baumgratz, Cramer, and Plenio and the coherence resource monotone that we identify is found to characterize the nonclassicality traditionally analyzed via the Glauber-Sudarshan P distribution. This suggests that identical quantum resources underlie both quantum coherence in the discrete finite dimensional case and the nonclassicality of quantum light. We show that our construction belongs to a family of resource monotones within the framework of a resource theory of linear optics, thus establishing deeper connections between the class of incoherent operations in the finite dimensional regime and linear optical operations in the continuous variable regime.

Disturbance-based measure of macroscopic coherence

We propose a measure of macroscopic coherence based on the degree of disturbance caused by a coarse-grained measurement. Based on our measure, we point out that recently proposed criteria of macroscopic coherence may lead to inconsistent results when considering certain states such as a product of microscopic superpositions. An inequality relation is proved that relates the Wigner-Yanase-Dyson skew information and the measurement disturbance, providing arguments as to why our approach is able to rule out such inconsistencies. Our work provides a general framework of quantifying macroscopic coherence from an operational point of view, based on the relationship between the precision of the measurement and disturbance of the quantum state.